Remembering Harold Pinter

David Edgar's otherwise cogent challenge to received opinions about Harold Pinter's political aspects (Pinter's weasels, 29 December) suggests "He was wrong to defend Milosevic", which I never noticed the playwright doing. It was the US State Department which for a long time treated Milosevic as "A man we can do business with" (Richard Holbrooke), until it suited Washington to dismantle Serbia.

Pinter's outspoken verbal attacks on the disproportionate and ill-targeted violence of Nato's US/UK-led bombardments of the Balkans no more endorsed the barbarism of Milosevic-programmed atrocities, than the dismay of Pinter and countless others at Israeli-led and US/UK-backed carnage in Lebanon and Gaza represents any sort of defence of Hezbollah-led or Hamas-orchestrated onslaughts on Israelis.

Pinter's basic point, as I understand it, was that military/brute force "solutions" tend to prolong and extend the problems, at the cost of ever more blameless lives the longer they are extended.Michael HorovitzNew Departures/Poetry Olympics, London

Master of the pause, poet of hesitation in the theatre, Harold Pinter had a ready response to those who challenged his volubly graphic crusade on behalf of human rights. Don't such explicit depictions of torture, he was often asked, cause even sympathisers to turn away, feeling that they themselves have been, in a sense, abused by forced exposure to such detail?

In one such interview (with the BBC), Harold, who had been taking in the question, sitting perfectly still, suddenly exploded. Whose forced exposure are we talking about? These men with 200 volts exploding in their testicles, these women being raped in every orifice by their torturers - are they not sensitive? Are they not caring? Wouldn't they, like us, prefer not to think about torture? Whose sensibilities should we be worrying about here? The journalist may well have expected, indeed hoped to elicit, this reply. But even if Pinter's position was expected, the sheer power of his conviction, his visceral empathy and moral clarity were more than tonic.

Once again, Pinter located the menace in our moments of hesitation, the crimes enacted by our silence. Marguerite FeitlowitzAuthor, A Lexicon of Terror: Argentina and the Legacies of Torture, Washington

On a magical sunday afternoon at the Gate Theatre in Dublin 2005 to mark Pinter's 75th birthday there were readings to mark his works by Jeremy Irons, Cathy Belton, Stephen Rea, Penelope Wilton, culminating by a reading by Pinter himself. I asked the person next to me what he thought of it - unknown to me at the time, it was Tom Stoppard. He loved it. It was also fitting that Pinter received the Nobel prize for literature a few weeks later. His plays will burn brightly while theatres breathe originality and substance.JJ CaseyMacroom, Co Cork, Ireland